Paul Tillich Quotes
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Man is asked to make of himself what he is supposed to become to fulfill his destiny.
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Language... has created the word 'loneliness' to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word 'solitude' to express the glory of being alone.
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The awareness of the ambiguity of one's highest achievements (as well as one's deepest failures) is a definite symptom of maturity.
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Faith is the state of being ultimately concerned.
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The second element in absolute faith is the dependence of the experience of nonbeing on the experience on being and the dependence of the experience of meaninglessness on the experience of meaning. even in the state of despair one has enough being to make despair possible.
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Cruelty towards others is always also cruelty towards ourselves.
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Doubt is not the opposite of faith; it is one element of faith.
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There is no love which does not become help.
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We cannot love unless we have accepted forgiveness, and the deeper our experience of forgiveness is, the greater is our love.
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Neurosis is the way of avoiding non-being by avoiding being.
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The first duty of love is to listen.
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I hope for the day when everyone can speak again of God without embarrassment.
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In Calvinism and sectarianism man became more and more transformed into an abstract moral subject, as in Descartes he was considered an epistemological subject.
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Philosophy and theology ask the question of being. But they ask it from different perspectives. Philosophy deals with the structure of being in itself; theology deals with the meaning of being for us. From this difference convergent and divergent trends emerge in the relation of theology and philosophy.
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The courage to be is the courage to accept oneself, in spite of being unacceptable.
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The courage to be is rooted in the God who appears when God has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt.
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Life remains ambiguous as long as there is life. The question implied in the ambiguities of life derives to a new question, namely, that of the direction in which life moves. This is the question of history. Systematically speaking, history, characterized as it as by its direction
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God's forgiveness is unconditional. There is no condition whatsoever in man which would make him worthy of forgiveness. If forgiveness were conditional, conditioned by man, no one could be accepted and no one could accept himself. We know that this is our situation, but we loathe to face it.
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If my tongue were trained to measures, I would sing a stirring song.
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Man's ultimate concern must be expressed symbolically, because symbolic language alone is able to express the ultimate.